This invention relates generally to data centers, and more particularly to efficient cooling of computing devices within a data center.
Heat removal is a prominent factor in computer system and data center design. The number of servers deployed in a data center has steadily increased while the increase in server performance has increased the heat generated by the electronic components in the servers during operation. Because the reliability of servers used by the data center decreases if they are permitted to operate at a high temperature over time, a portion of the data center's power is used for cooling electronics in the servers. As the number or servers included in a data center increases, a greater portion of the power consumed by the data center is used to cool electronics within the server.
Conventionally, the servers in the data center are individually equipped with a cooling system to dissipate heat produced during operation. Commonly, each server includes a fan to dissipate heat generated by the server during operation. However, these internal fans generally consume about 10%-15% of the power used by the servers, and they also produce heat during operation, thereby limiting the ability of these fans to dissipate heat.
Additionally, in conventional configurations, an internal server fan is initiated to cool the server when the server temperature reaches a threshold temperature. As the server temperature is dependent upon the number of data processing requests, data retrieval requests, data storage requests or other requests processed by the server, the number of requests processed by a server are limited so that a temperature spikes during processing of requests does not cause the server to exceed the threshold temperature. Hence, operation of conventional internal fans impairs server performance by placing an upper bound on the number of requests that can be processed by a server.